Easy, Creative Ways to Encourage Children to be Innovative
/Children are always learning and memorizing. The route home from the bus stop or the grocery store. The sequence of the colors in the rainbow. They hear a new song and want to listen to it a hundred times until they master it and know every word.
It is an accomplishment that conjures an immense sense of pride. And not just in children — you are sure to know all the words to a song, or two, or ten thousand.
What if we encouraged children also to invent new words to a song, or add new parts? Suddenly, a song isn’t on repeat for a hundred times. Instead, it’s reborn a thousand different ways.
When we provide opportunities for our children to invent and reinvent, we celebrate diversity, encourage innovation, promote acceptance and demonstrate healthy coping strategies.
We can still congratulate our brains for memorizing, but we can also start to understand our power to change things, to create new things, and to accept ideas that may be different than what we thought or what we learned.
Taking these principles into the classroom, we can easily and creatively encourage children to become more curious and innovative… Here are some of our favorite ways to foster innovation in children.
1. Combine Movement with Music
One of our favorite Yo Re Mi classroom group activities is “What Do You See In The Sea?” (it’s one of the best water-theme activities for kids overall, too!) For each verse, one child will pick an ocean creature, and we’ll create movements together.
To punctuate the verses, the chorus remains the same. Children delight in selecting whales, dolphins, mermaids and sharks. Some even invent a new sea creature with its own special yoga pose.
Combining movement with music helps children develop mind-body awareness, self-confidence and focus.
2. Encourage Collaboration
Let’s continue to expand on the aforementioned song. Children love “What Do You See in the Sea” because there’s lots of excitement in awaiting the next friend's turn. We can come up with some pretty creative sea creatures!
When we’ve exhausted ourselves in the ocean with a spectacular array of sea life, we often finish this song resting in starfish pose. If we do the song again the next week, the children are often excited to see how it might be completely different. When we encourage collaboration at home or in the classroom, we encourage innovation.
READ NEXT: More great animal yoga poses for children (includes starfish pose!)
We teach parents and educators more in-depth about our collaboration approach at our kids yoga teacher trainings, but find that by combining our unique teaching style, play-based Reggio Emilia-inspired approach, and music and movement activities, we can foster self-expression, creativity and communication.
3. Flip It and Reverse It
Many of our favorite song inventions recall the folk tradition: in addition to “Call and Response” children’s music, folk traditions allow us to take something, spin it around, make it reflect your reality and your interests.
Groups of people have been making stories and songs this way for thousands of years. And don’t think that “folk” means acoustic music, or soft songs, or any of that. “Folk” just means “People”, and people do things all kinds of ways.
4. Embrace Open-Minded Learning
Like devotees of the classic 80’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and audiences at immersive theatre projects like “Sleep No More,” children are more invested when they are active participants in their learning.
Embrace open-minded learning and invention at home or in your classroom: Take an old song, and make some new words.
Turn the map upside down, for instance. And if a child says, “Nooo! It doesn’t go like that!,” remind them that there are lots of ways to get somewhere, and today you’d like to try walking home a new way.
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